Ho Chi Minh, for his part, arrived on June 12 in France , where he was invited and where he was welcomed as Head of State. We could hope for everything from this trip. Alas! when the president of the provisional government of the R.D.V.N. set foot in France, our country had not yet decided on its Indochinese policy and, what is more, it did not even have a government! The Félix Gouin firm, which had succeeded. in January, to that of General de Gaulle, after the latter had left power, had just been overthrown, and it was necessary to wait for the formation of a government. constituted this time by Georges Bidault. so that, on June 22, Ho Chi Minh would be officially received in the capital.
For ten days, in Biarritz, I had to make France's guest wait with tourist walks and tuna fishing trips!
Meanwhile, in Cochinchina, thanks to the support of its allies and the campaign quickly led by Leclerc, thanks also to the loyalty of Vietnamese elements little attracted by the adventure and the regime that prevailed in Hanoi, France had found some solid positions and harbored many illusions.
These pushed Admiral d'Argenlieu, encouraged by some die-hards, to seek a solution specific to Cochinchina, which, unlike Annam and Tonkin, was a French colony. On June 1, the territory was endowed with a provisional government.
This unilateral decision, which Ho Chi Minh had learned on the plane which brought him to France, accentuated the feelings of mistrust with whom the Vietnamese delegation approached the Fontainebleau conference. Already, the preparatory conference, held in April, in Dalat, had revealed that a final agreement would be difficult to reach.
In both camps, political passions also played their part. On the French side, the Communists violently took up the cause of Vietnamese demands, while the right, in reaction, encouraged our negotiators to intransigence and cried treason. Result:the tension rose day by day and, day by day, skepticism won both camps. It didn't take much to increase the usual mistrust of the Vietnamese, who are always inclined to believe that we were only trying to circumvent the agreements of March 6.
But all these questions of form or climate would not have been enough to cause the conference to fail if there had not been fundamental problems which the divergence of points of view made almost impossible to resolve. These were mainly:the union of the Three Kys; Customs; diplomatic representation; the place to be given to the French language.
In reality, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam wanted to obtain all the prerogatives of an independent state; France only wanted to recognize those of an autonomous state within the Indochinese Federation and the French Union. However, if Ho Chi Minh accepted the French Union, he was repelled by the Federation in that it fragmented Vietnam.